Public Lecture - Foreign Correspondence in the Digital Age

As part of the Research Institute for Arts and Humanities (RIAH) public lecture series, Professor Kevin Williams will give a lecture at Swansea University on Monday 10 May addressing some of the key problems facing foreign correspondence in the digital age.

Author of several best selling books on the media including Get Me a Murder a Day!: a History of Mass Communication in Britain and Read All About It! A History of the British Newspaper, Professor Williams will argue that foreign correspondence is not changing as many believe or argue.

Leading practitioners believe the foreign correspondent is becoming an ‘endangered species’. The production of foreign news is according to newspapers such as the Los Angeles Times ‘shrinking in the era of globalisation’. Buffeted by political, social, cultural and technological changes many argue there is no future for foreign news reporting. This talk explores whether the claim of instant demise is justified.

The speaker seeks to stress continuity rather than change. The new technologies are magnifying many of the problems that have traditionally confronted foreign news reporting and the picture of the world on offer in the new media is not significantly different from that presented by the old media. There is no revolution in international reporting and international news gathering. Rather international journalism is natural evolving, as it always has done, in response to the changing world in which it operates.

The RIAH public lecture will be held on Monday 10 May 2010. It will start promptly at 6pm with refreshments available before the lecture from 5.15pm. It will take place in the Wallace Lecture Theatre, Wallace Building, Swansea University. The lecture is free and all are welcome.

Kevin Williams is author of several books on the media including Get Me a Murder a Day !: a History of Mass Communication in Britain (Bloomsbury, 2009; Second Edition); Understanding Media Theory (Arnold, 2003); European Media Studies (Arnold, 2005) and Read All About It! A History of the British Newspaper (Routledge, 2010). He is presently completing a book for Sage in International Journalism. He has also written widely about the media in Wales including a regular column for Planet: The Welsh Internationalist in the 1990s and a book Shadows and Substance: a Media Policy for Wales (Gomer, 1996).